program notes continuo part, providing understated support for the plaintive, heart wrenching melodies of the solo violins. The concerto’s pervasive imitation is particularly noteworthy. In the resolute first movement, the lyrical second, and the frantic third movement, the violinists incessantly trade phrases back and forth; indeed, the two parts only truly differ in terms of their range.
STRAUSS Ein Heldenleben Duration: 40 minutes While Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) was not the last of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems, it was the final entry in the famous series that began a decade earlier with Don Juan. As such, it is often interpreted as a sort of summation of Strauss’s career around the time his focus shifted from orchestral works to operas. Strauss made one of his earliest references to “A Hero’s Life” in a letter dated July 25, 1898, written from the resort town of Marquartstein: Since Beethoven’s Eroica is so extremely unpopular with our conductors and hence rarely performed, I am filling a desperate need by composing a tone poem of substantial length entitled Hero’s Life, which has no funeral march to be sure, but is yet in E-flat major with lots of horn sound, since horns are, after all, the thing for heroism. Thanks to the healthy country air, my sketch has progressed so well there that, if no special delay develops, I can hope to finish the work by New Year’s. Apparently there was no delay—Strauss completed the piece in Berlin on December 27, and led the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester in the work’s premiere on March 3, 1899. Theodore Thomas led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the American premiere just over a year later on March 10, 1900. Strauss’s earlier tone poems—Don Juan, Macbeth, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Don Quixote—were all based on extant literary works, written-out programs, or characters from folklore. A Hero’s Life has no program, however; as Strauss proclaimed to poet Romain Rolland, “There is no need for a program; it is enough to know there is a hero fighting his enemies.” While some have suggested that the “hero” portrayed was Strauss himself—a characterization Strauss describes as only “partly true”—he wrote in the program notes for the work’s premiere that the work’s subject was “a more general and free ideal of great and manly heroism.” His comparison of the work to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, another work that refers to a generalized hero, supports this assertion. The music may have the last word, however. Written in six sections, each of which bear titles that Strauss later wanted removed, the work contains numerous musical allusions to Strauss’s own life. The bold opening melody introduces “The Hero,” with subsidiary
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